Superior Reason

Curzon in India.

They don’t make empires the way they used to. Take the imperial brag. Here is George Nathaniel, Viscount Curzon—the most grandiloquent, if not the greatest, Viceroy of India—and the subject of David Gilmour’s elegant biography, “Curzon” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $45), waxing epic-messianic on the British imperial mission: “To me the message is carved in granite; it is hewn out of the rock of doom—that our work is righteous and that it shall endure.” And here is Proconsul Jay Garner, musing on the prospects of the American imperium in Iraq: “If we make headway on a lot of major things, we will put ourselves in a marvellous up-ramp where things can begin happening. If we don’t do that we’re on a negative ramp.”

And, frankly, the dress code has gone right down the thunder box. Meeting with the Emir of Afghanistan, in 1894, Curzon appeared in a uniform acquired at a theatrical costumier, complete with operatic epaulettes, a curved sword borrowed in India, and a row of clinking medals. Installed as Viceroy five years later, Curzon, who was a stickler for protocol, insisted that his councillors don white knee breeches and white silk stockings for formal occasions, as he himself did, and not “take refuge in the less dangerous but irregular trouser.” Proconsul Garner, on the other hand, appeared in Dress-Down Friday casuals and proceeded to wander amiably around the streets of his shattered bailiwick, like a Scout leader vaguely searching for his Eagle Troop. His successor, Proconsul L. Paul Bremer III, favors the battle dress of the C.E.O.—crisply pressed suit, high-end haircut, peekaboo breast-pocket handkerchief—to project an air of mildly corporate persuasiveness, just the right note for an empire that fancies it can be run like a business opportunity, and busies itself handing out contracts to the willing while failing to mop up the brimming sewage. But then ours is an empire, unlike Curzon’s, that wishes it weren’t there—at least, not as another election season comes into view. Was there ever an empire whose new subjects had to implore their rulers to supply rudimentary law and order?

Curzon had no doubt that the only justification for empire was the efficiency of its administration. In the choice between good government (as he saw it) and self-government, he believed that his duty was emphatically to the former when it came to India. This was best provided by a paternalist state, staffed by disinterested professional public servants, intervening to guarantee the common decencies of life—uncontaminated water, for example, whether in Birmingham or Bombay. Democratic self-determination was certainly worthwhile in the fullness of time, but it was not going to put rice on the table.

These were, more or less, the maxims with which Curzon grew up, and which he seldom abandoned in forty years’ service to an empire that was, as the dedication to one of his many books put it, “under Providence the greatest instrument for good the world has ever seen.” Many of his generation, born around the middle of the nineteenth century, felt the same righteous intoxication. Although the British had come to India, in the eighteenth century, to make money, the making of it required military force—just enough, of course, to create the political stability needed for the Anglo-Indian economy to take off under its own steam. But the wars, instead of calming India, had a nasty way of stirring it up, either inside the country or on its frontiers, and this triggered yet more intervention, until, somehow, the British, who had never meant to be occupiers, occupied virtually the entire subcontinent. With that unlooked-for transformation from a trading power to a governing power, the rationale for the Raj changed. Instead of making profits, the idea was to make India a better place. Instead of businessmen, Britain sent out Improvers, educated in Indian languages at Haileybury College, zealous secular missionaries for Victorian education and morality. In a valedictory speech delivered in Bombay, Curzon, who communed almost obsessively with the ghosts of Viceroys past, faithfully reiterated this ideal:

Remember that the Almighty has placed your hand on the greatest of His ploughs, in whose furrow the nations of the future are germinating and taking shape, to drive the blade a little forward in your time, and to feel that somewhere among these millions you have left a little justice or happiness or prosperity.

As a boy at Eton College in the mid-eighteen-seventies, Curzon heard a speech by Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, the legal member of the Viceroy’s Council, which seems to have fired his personal sense of mission. Stephen’s father, James, had been among the first generation of India’s Westernizers, who believed that the colonized would be led toward self-determination but only after many generations during which the imperial guardians would supply the rule of law, Anglophone education, and, above all, the peace needed for the flowering of prosperity. The toiling peasant, freed from the brutal exactions of native tax collectors, would be able to break through a cycle of subsistence, and produce crops (like raw cotton) actually demanded by British manufacturers and consumers. As the thrifty cultivator prospered, so other demands would make themselves spontaneously felt: literacy, sanitation, and, finally, responsible citizenship.

This was the “partnership,” often mentioned by imperial apologists, whose consummation would be the blessed day when power could be responsibly transferred from rulers to ruled; the Union Jack would flutter down the flagpole while a band of marines, their pith helmets blancoed to dazzling whiteness, played Elgar, and an audience of grateful native beneficiaries politely applauded and made their way to the tea tent. It seldom turned out that way. The “empire of free trade” was free only up to a point. When it worked to flood the Indian market (once the province of a thriving native cotton-print industry) with inexpensive manufactured goods, it could be upheld, but, if Indian textiles threatened to make inroads in Britain, tariff manipulations made sure that they remained uncompetitive.

Nor was the legacy of a “parliamentary empire” and the rule of law straightforward. In India—whose three hundred million made up nearly three-fourths of the Empire’s population (and a fifth of the world’s in 1900)—the conditions of pacification (an army of two hundred thousand) permanently stunted economic growth through the sheer weight of land revenues needed to fund it. When the British left their Raj, the per-capita income of Indians was precisely as they had found it, two hundred years earlier.

An American edition of Gilmour’s “Curzon” (which was published in England nine years ago) is a timely opportunity to consider all these matters, especially since the empire on which the sun was never supposed to set has lately been enjoying a positive reëvaluation, above all in Niall Ferguson’s dashing and trenchant “Empire,” a book that is unembarrassed not only to sing its praises but to urge its example on the makers of the new Pax Americana. Though Gilmour’s biography is less concerned with tackling the knottier cost-benefit problems of making and keeping empires, lest such problems get in the way of a fast-moving, entertaining, and finely written story, moments along the route of an eventful life have a gripping topicality. Exactly a century ago, in 1903, the Viceroy made a side trip to the Persian Gulf, in effect the gateway to Britain’s Raj (and referred to by some as “Curzon Lake”), to encourage the Sultan of Muscat and the Sheikh of Kuwait to think of Britain—rather than the Ottoman Empire—as their principal protector. “The peace of these waters must still be maintained,” Curzon insisted, and followed with a classic instance of empire-think: “Your independence will continue to be upheld, and the influence of the British government must remain supreme.” In other words, ignore the Turks, resist the Russians, and expect frequent “good will” visits from the Royal Navy.

Gilmour has a soft spot for Curzon, and he succeeds in persuading the reader that his subject was a fundamentally decent, startlingly egotistical, surpassingly learned man who combined huge reserves of self-belief with an almost incredible ability to alienate everyone he thought his inferior. His friend Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India, urged him to suffer fools more gladly, since they constitute most of the human race, but to no avail. Curzon worked himself, as he often said, like a horse and expected others to do likewise. “Grind, grind grind,” he moaned in a letter to his wife, Mary, in 1901, “till the collar breaks and the poor beast stumbles and dies. . . . But it has always been so. The willing horse is flogged till he drops and the work goes on.” And on it went, indeed. On tours of inspection through the Indian provinces, Curzon managed (tiger shoots permitting) an average of thirty to forty letters a day. Delegation he thought fit only for the idle and the criminally negligent.

Gilmour is understandably eager to rescue Curzon from the rich lore of mostly apocryphal Curzoniana testifying to His Lordship’s comical detachment from the experience of the rest of mankind. He never did, it seems, marvel at the whiteness of the skin of the working classes, upon seeing soldiers bathing near Armentières in the Great War; nor, on exiting his club and finding himself without a cab, did he summon an omnibus and order the driver to take him home. He did try to silence the chimes of Big Ben, on the ground that they disturbed his sleep, and he complained that the red carpet rolled out to greet him in Calcutta when he became Viceroy was “the size of a postage stamp.” But even if the gently taunting rhyme composed at Oxford—

My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,

I am a most superior person,

My cheek is pink, my hair is sleek,

I dine at Blenheim once a week

—trapped him throughout his career in the stereotype of the haughty aristocrat, there is little point in pretending that Curzon was common clay. In fact, an uneasy suspicion that his seven-hundred-year-old family of Derbyshire landowners had done little except hang on to their estate seems to have prodded into action what became the most hyperactive sense of duty in late-Victorian England.

There were the usual torments of growing up in that era: an indifferent father, who seems to have been slightly vexed at being pulled from the obscurity of a country rectory by the accidents of descent to become Lord Scarsdale; a governess who, even by the standards of the time, was creatively sadistic, ordering little George to write specially to the butler to have the cane made with which he might, please, be thoroughly thrashed. But George could hardly have missed the summons to imperial greatness singing from the stones of the Scarsdale house, Kedleston, one of the first English buildings that the great eighteenth-century Scottish architect Robert Adam worked on. Kedleston’s façade featured a pilastered version of the triumphal Arch of Constantine and an interior saloon inspired by the Pantheon and decorated with niches modelled on Hadrian’s Temple of Venus and Rome. In the circumstances, it was not surprising that the boy developed a precociously grandiose manner, writing home from his prep school at the age of twelve that “a hamper is undoubtedly requisite” and must include “several pots of superior jam.” At Eton, he excelled at “declamation,” and although he came second in the Latin prize oration in 1877, as David Dilks’s biography “Curzon in India” tells us, a corrected citation satisfyingly notes that “the best declamation has been written by Foley, the second best by Mr Curzon. Unfortunately, in the greater part of what he has written Foley has been anticipated by Cicero. The prize therefore goes to Mr Curzon.”

There was no question that this was a very clever fellow. And, attached to the notion that deep knowledge was a qualification, rather than a disqualification, for high office, Curzon never shrank from parading his well-stocked intellect. It gave him what Margot Asquith, the wife of the Liberal Prime Minister, called an air of “enamelled self-assurance.” In the apprenticeship that he designed for his imperial career, he undertook long journeys and intensive investigations, both scholarly and personal, of the history, archeology, religion, languages, and ethnic customs of Central Asia, a region that he believed was vital to protecting the Empire’s crown jewel, India. Based on the experience of these journeys of many months—travelling by mule and bullock cart; often cooking for himself; sleeping on Oriental rugs—he wrote thousands of pages: books on Persia, on Russia in Central Asia, on Kashmir and the Pamirs, and even on the problems of the Far East. And he believed that this direct experience gave him the right to speak with authority on the most urgent concerns of security for the British Empire, both inside Parliament and out.

Treks through the Caucasus were not the young Curzon’s only expeditions. He grazed the dinner tables of London society and aristocratic country-house parties, where he was admired for his quick repartee, his waggish thank-you verses, and the air of chiselled Roman authority that he made sure to project. Women, some of them married, panted after him, and he returned the favor, along with borrowings from Dante Gabriel Rossetti. More than any other biographer, Gilmour makes clear that Curzon’s libido was inseparable from his political ambition and just as voracious. Until he married the American Mary Leiter, at the age of thirty-six, he had a succession of passionate affairs, despite a style of love letter that sounded like an official memo. When his lover Sibell Grosvenor decided to marry one of his friends, Curzon’s parting exclamation of anguish was “The taking out of a man’s life of that which he has grown to regard as a treasure and core of his being is not accomplished without a pang.”

The self-conscious development of what journalists, reviewing Curzon’s maiden speech in the House of Commons, called his “unconquerable ‘cheek’ ” and “his air of ineffable superiority” was all part of his intensive training to be Viceroy. Before assuming the office, in 1899, he visited the Viceregal Lodge in Simla; Lord Elgin was in office at the time, and Curzon confided to his diary that when he returned it would be as Viceroy. While he was Under-Secretary of State for India, he twice lobbied Lord Salisbury for the job, and finally got it.

En route to his new post, Curzon read everything and interrogated everyone about India, on and on through the broiling heat of the Red Sea. Once he arrived, he dismissed the notion that the Raj could simultaneously advance representative self-government for educated Indians—in courts and local government—and preserve the peace, stability, and prosperity of the Indian empire. But this was more or less what Queen Victoria had promised in an 1858 Royal Proclamation opening the civil service in India without prejudice to Indians and British. Formidable barriers had been placed in the way of any practical realization, not the least being that examinations were held only in England, precluding the possibility of high-caste Hindus, with their taboo on oceanic travel, competing. The establishment of three universities had created a literate class, especially in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. Many of the educated were schoolteachers, journalists, doctors, and lawyers, but many of them were petty civil servants, without whom the Raj would have been incapable of governing, since the “heaven-born” Indian Civil Service—the collectors and district commissioners, the police chiefs, surveyors, engineers, and magistrates numbered barely nine hundred men.

For Curzon, however, the babus of Calcutta and Bombay were hardly better than overeducated parasites who, under the guise of Indian patriotism, were dedicated to taking power for themselves and killing off the Raj as quickly as possible. So he went out of his way to ignore and alienate them, duly turning moderates into militants. As urban types—the bhadralok—they had nothing in common with the masses of peasants whose interests they purported to uphold. He, the Viceroy, knew better, that the toiling ryot was more interested in concrete improvements in daily life—the construction of irrigation canals, the establishment of credit “societies” to get the moneylenders off his back—and these he provided. Gilmour rightly gives Curzon credit for pushing through such ameliorations, yet, catalogued as they are, they inevitably resemble one of the Viceroy’s own self-congratulatory memorandums, rather than offering a full picture of Indian life during his tenure.

Curzon liked to think of himself as a mover and shaker, but mostly what he moved and shook was piles of paper. Though he did his tours, ordained into existence thousands of miles of railroad track, and created an agricultural research institute, he was insulated from the overwhelming reality of India at the turn of the century—a reality of stark horror. Beginning in 1896, in Elgin’s Viceroyalty, a succession of famines, triggered by failures of the monsoon, swept the country; the devastation was compounded by epidemics of cholera and bubonic plague, which in turn weakened the physical resistance of survivors. Curzon, the inheritor of this mass misery, was tactless in saying that the disaster was no more his responsibility than that of “the man in the moon,” but the issue was, rather, whether he did everything in his power to alleviate the suffering. Gilmour spends forty pages describing the relentless feud between Curzon and the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, Herbert Kitchener, which led eventually to the Viceroy’s resignation; it seems a pity that he could not have found more than a page to examine the famine-relief policy of the Viceroy and his government. Missing, too, among the illustrations of the Viceroy with dead tigers, the Viceroy with assorted nizams and maharajas is another kind of contemporary photograph, the kind taken by missionaries with Kodaks, of cadavers of children who had been devoured by wild dogs and jackals, of saucer-eyed victims of starvation.

In fairness, Gilmour’s biography appeared long before the savage indictment set out in Mike Davis’s “Late Victorian Holocausts” (2001), a book that at its most extreme accuses the British Empire of creating the permanent immiseration of the Third World. The reader doesn’t have to agree with this conclusion (or even sympathize with Davis’s Marxism) to see that he makes a devastatingly persuasive case about the British preference for traditional market-and-revenue interests over “indiscriminate” relief. Curzon himself claimed “that there had never been a famine when the general mortality had been less, when the distress has been more amply or swiftly relieved.” But there were fierce voices of dissent at the time—from the nationalist politician Romesh Chandra Dutt and from the first Indian British M.P., Dadabhai Naoroji, and also from Western journalists like Vaughan Nash, of the Manchester Guardian. They looked with disgust at the eligibility “tests” that were imposed on the starving, and (much like those in Ireland a half century earlier) forced them to walk, often many miles, to work camps, where they were required to labor nine hours a day for as little as fifteen ounces of food. Even the official British report conceded that the famine of 1899 to 1900 took a million and a quarter lives, but the mortality estimates of modern historians like Burton Stein put the figure closer to six and a half million dead.

In a public debate with Dutt (which Gilmour thinks Curzon won), the Viceroy blamed the vicissitudes of climate rather than any government policy for the severity of the disaster. His critics did not, of course, make light of the failure of monsoon and harvest, but their point was that the weight of the taxes—especially the land-revenue and the salt tax (designed once again to favor British imports over domestic salt)—was so crushing that it reduced purchasing power to the point where modest but viable cultivators in bad years became destitute and, ultimately, starved. As always, the imperatives of British military policy—in this case the Boer War—made fiscal leniency out of the question. To his credit, Curzon did try to persuade the Westminster government to reduce the salt tax, as a gift to India in the year of the Coronation Durbar, but, not surprisingly, he failed. The exceptional distress endured during these years undercut the claims of the Raj to offer autocratic benevolence as an alternative to liberal, nationalist politics. The failings of the Curzon model made the appeal of swadeshi—self-help—the starting principle of Indian independence.

Curzon’s anxiety about the budding of Indian nationalism was such that he created a primitive police-intelligence system to monitor its growth. Wherever he suspected institutions of fostering sedition, he did his utmost to cramp their growing space. University senates were cut back, while in a speech in Calcutta Curzon notoriously described truth as largely a Western invention. And, since the highest concentration of dangerous chatterers, especially in print, was in the densely populated province of Bengal, he took his knife to its political geography. The partition, which he presented, disingenuously, as an administrative necessity, was so transparently designed to separate Muslim from Hindu Bengalis, making each easier to govern, that it provoked an inevitable and ferocious backlash. Demonstrators took to the streets. Rabindranath Tagore wrote poems and songs in protest. Riots became violent. It was the beginning of the end of the Raj.

Curzon left India in 1905. Although he was still only in his mid-forties, it was more than a decade before he returned to office, as a minister in Lloyd George’s coalition wartime government. In 1916, he was put in charge of the infant Air Board and eventually, to his heart’s content, was made Foreign Secretary. In the years after the First World War, with crises constantly cropping up in the Near East, Curzon’s mastery of detail counted. In a heated debate over whether Mosul should be given to the new Turkish Republic or remain part of the quasi-British protectorate of the Kingdom of Iraq, the Turkish foreign minister made the terrible mistake of wondering how his British opposite number could possibly know anything about the population of Mosul. As Gilmour writes, Curzon proceeded to show him how, including a lecture on the Kurdish majority and the historical differences between Ottomans and Turkomans. It is unlikely that any Foreign Secretary will ever know as much about this region as Curzon.

Yet, for all his grip on statistics, his mastery of memorandums, his geopolitical expertise, Curzon did, in the end, belong to the imperial past. By the time he was being considered (and rejected) for Prime Minister, in 1923, the devolution of power in India had gone so far that a dual government had been established, with Indians responsible for much internal administration and the British running military and strategic policy.

In the years before his death, in 1925, history was where he was happiest. He bought some of the most beautiful houses in the country and restored them with a light but exacting touch: the moated Bodiam Castle, in Sussex; the Tudor Montacute House, in Somerset; Tattershall Castle, in Lincolnshire. He wrote about them, of course; but his interest was not just that of a greedy aristocrat. He thought of these places—as he thought of his own life—as part of the national patrimony, the mysterious ravelling of past and future. Many of the houses were repaired for the nation on condition that they would be publicly accessible. And, in the same sense, Curzon insisted—as he had when he restored, exquisitely, the heavily damaged Taj Mahal and the town of Fatehpur Sikri—that the conservation of ancient and religious monuments was a sacred duty of whichever imperial power happened to be granted their temporary custody. “If there be any one who says to me there is no duty devolving upon a Christian government to preserve the monuments of a pagan art, or the sanctuaries of an alien faith, I cannot pause to argue with such a man.” Because Curzon understood the power of tradition as a living thing, which gave an ancient community identity, faith, and hope, he had, as a young writer, warned against the rush to cozen traditional societies into dye-stamp modernity. In our own haste to make the world more like us we could do worse than heed his caution:

We must remember that the ways of Orientals are not our ways, nor their thoughts our thoughts. Often when we think them backward and stupid, they think us meddlesome and absurd. The loom of time moves slowly with them, and they care not for high pressure and the roaring of the wheels. Our system may be good for us; but it is neither equally, not altogether good for them. Satan found it better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven; and the normal Asiatic would sooner be misgoverned by Asiatics than well governed by Europeans. ♦